One of the many minor miracles achieved by Ryan Coogler’s Rocky follow-up Creed is the unexpected depth the movie lends to the events of Rocky IV, the thinnest and cheesiest entry in the saga so far. By chronicling the boxing aspirations of Adonis Creed (Michael B. Jordan), the heretofore unknown illegitimate son of…

There have been relatively few sequels produced by Walt Disney Feature Animation—that is, the flagship Disney cartoon brand, not Pixar or any of their TV divisions—and it’s easy to see why. Disney specializes in happy-ending family entertainment, and producing a follow-up to a beloved all-ages cartoon places the young…

“We have a spectacle,” announces King Edward (Stephen Dillane) in the middle of both an England-Scotland peace brokering and a long, circling-camera take that opens Outlaw King.This exposition-heavy early scene, which includes in its unbroken shot Robert The Bruce (Chris Pine) sword-dueling with an opponent who…

If Walt Disney Animation built its reputation on fairy tales and princesses, is upstart animation house Illumination founded on supervillains? Four of its first eight cartoons are part of the Despicable Mefamily, detailing the adventures of a bad guy (reformed by his adoption of three girls) and his chattering minions

In some ways, Tyler Perry movies take place in their own specific world that merges stereotypes, romance-novel melodrama, and upwardly-mobile fantasies. But when his zany cast of characters (many but not all played by Perry himself) takes leave of his material, as in Nobody’s Fool, his movie’s faults start to look…

Because of her reputation as a shapeshifting oddball, Tilda Swinton has become a go-to fantasy casting choice for David Bowie. Yet when Swinton does play a (fictional) rock star in Luca Guadagnino’s A Bigger Splash, Guadagnino makes the strategic choice to give her minimal lines of full-volume dialogue. Her Marianne…

Many musical biopics depict their subjects’ output as monumentally, revolutionarily important. So there’s novelty to how much time Bohemian Rhapsody dedicates to the comparable strangeness of Queen’s songs. The movie puts forth that Freddie Mercury (Rami Malek) had a stage presence unlike any other singer, which…

In an episode of Norm Macdonald’s recent (and probably doomed) Netflix talk show, Norm Macdonald Has A Show, the comic asks fellow Saturday Night Live alumnus David Spade whether he ever wishes for a career that had been spent focusing near-exclusively on stand-up, rather than parlaying his success in that field into…

It sounds like an easy layup: Rowan Atkinson inserted into James Bond-style adventures, rubber-faced and disaster-prone where your Sean Connerys and Daniel Craigs are steely and sexy. Maybe Johnny English could have been Atkinson’s own Pink Panther series; the title of Johnny English Strikes Again certainly bears that…

Nostalgia will radiate off the screen for audience members of a certain age almost immediately in Mid90s, when the camera pans across a bedroom, catching sight of Ninja Turtles sheets and a Hulk Hogan pillow before settling on a kid around 13 years old. Stevie (Sunny Suljic) is in front of a mirror, nursing bruises…

I spoke briefly last week about my trepidation over using Baby Dawn, daughter of Polaris and her estranged love Eclipse, as a peril generator for stories on The Gifted. Part of this probably has to do with me being a parent now, but really I’ve never much cared for movies that hinge on child endangerment (give or take…

Is there any workable way to make a movie satirizing the rancor and viciousness of Trump-era politics without dissolving into trite both-sides-so-crazy fallacies? In The Oath, his first feature as a writer-director, comic actor Ike Barinholtz zeroes in on an approach somewhere between caustic stage comedy and The Purge

A stand-alone movie starring extreme Spider-Man opponent Venom looks, from a distance, like a beacon of ’90s nostalgia, addressing that era’s tendencies to go big and fan-baiting in its comics yet weirdly small and chintzy in its comics-based movies. (At least those that don’t feature Batman.) But as it turns out,…

Everyone’s feeling out of place in their causes in this week’s episode of The Gifted. Well, not everyone; if everyone truly felt out of place, who would be there to comfort, console, and argue with the characters who feel the worst? That dissatisfaction with how things are going—the sense that the characters’ various…

Throughout its first season, the strength of The Gifted, Fox’s other, not-so-trippy X-Men TV series, has not really been any particular fidelity to the tone of the X-Men comics (which even at their more emotional and grounded are—on average—a lot more out-there than this scrappy mutants-on-the-run family drama), or…

Smallfoot opens with a blast of narrated exposition from Migo (Channing Tatum), an enthusiastic Yeti who essentially pitches the movie that’s about to unfold. Migo explains that he’s a resident of a snowy mountain village whose residents have a belief system, carved in stone, that forbids them from dipping below the…

Gilda Radner was on Saturday Night Live for five years, during which she distinguished herself with an ebullience that merged the joyfulness of her performance with the truth of whatever character she was playing. Those 106 episodes of the series are all on DVD, and it’s not too difficult to track down some of her…